General FAIL: The Military’s Worst Tweeters

Generals and admirals are powerful people. Their decisions determine the course of thousands of lives, with aftereffects that can affect millions more. Their budgets can dwarf those of entire countries. Their words are parsed like the Talmud for clues about the future of American warfare. And they absolutely cannot tweet.

Twitter may be nearing 200 million users worldwide. But the military has a love-hate relationship with microblogging: The Marines, for instance, banned it last year, along with other social networking services. But communications officers are coming around to the argument that it’s a tweet-or-be-tweeted-about information world. If the military doesn’t use tools like Twitter to spread its message, the argument goes, it’ll risk losing control of stories and influencing people. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has become a prolific tweeter as @thejointstaff, weighing in on controversies like the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The result: more than 32,000 followers.

Mullen, alas, is an exception. Twitter and flag officers still generally go together like oil and water. It’s a new medium, after all, and no one says they’ve got to go ALL-CAPS EVERYTHING like Kanye or get into tweet-fights with detractors to use the medium well. But for some, the growing pains are apparent, even if we’re not seeing any Direct-Message Fails.

(Full disclosure: The Pentagon asked me a few months ago to share some thoughts about social media at a recent forum.)

Just because you can set up a Twitter account doesn’t mean you use it well. Here’s our guide to some of the lamest military Twitter feeds.

1. Adm. James Stavridis. Stavridis, NATO’s supreme allied commander and former Southern Command leader, is considered by many to be one of the brightest lights in the military, a well-respected strategic thinker and all-but-certain future Joint Chiefs chairman. He’s also a technophile — he once assured bloggers that he personally replies to wall posters on his Facebook page — and prolific blogger. Here’s Stavridis riffing off of Dr. Strangelove to discuss a recent NATO strategic-planning document, for instance. Natural-born tweeter, right?

2. Gen. Carter Ham. Is it really necessary to tweet “Thanks!!!” to everyone who fills out a survey? Ham, the next commander of all U.S. troops in Africa, had the unenviable task this year of studying troops’ attitudes to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. By all accounts, he did a thorough and professional job. But if @GenCarterHam was supposed to supplement Ham’s effort, it didn’t exactly take advantage of Twitter. Not only did Ham tweet a mere 42 times between March and September, only 12 of those tweets asked troops to fill out online surveys about the repeal — and only half of those actually gave his tweeps the URL to do so. None used the popular #DADT hashtag to attract nonfollowers’ attention.

3. Gen. Martin Dempsey. Another missed opportunity. Dempsey commands the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command — basically the ground service’s brain. All the Army’s long-term thinking about the future of land warfare and how to adapt to it runs through TRADOC, as it’s known. Which is why following @Martin_Dempsey ought to be a real-time account of an adaptive Army.

But what do we get? “I encourage you to share your stories and photos of Fort Monroe’s rich heritage for a new book. Details at: http://bit.ly/ftmonroe” Or, in March: “Outstanding morning of briefers, ideas, and insight at the TRADOC Senior Leaders Conference here in WIlliamsburg, VA.” Maybe you could share with us what you learned? Instead, Dempsey prefers to tweet out speeches or guidance that he gives on modernizing the force. Far be it for a blog to deride the use of Twitter for self-promotion, but here’s an opportunity for Dempsey to interact with soldiers and learn what they think is necessary for the Army’s future. Indeed, here’s @Martin_Dempsey tweeting a speech he gave about getting soldiers to “engage the Army on what it means to be part of a profession,” rather than just calling them to do so on Twitter. All told, he asked for soldiers’ input a grand total of twice, and didn’t retweet a single reply. For TRADOC not to cash in on a transformative technological innovation is just too ironic.

4. Brig. Gen. Steven Spano. The previous tweeters are stingy with their big-think. But Spano, the communications chief for the Air Force’s Air Combat Command, has no shortage of way-out-there-in-the-blue tweets. His feed is actually one of my favorites, because rarely am I sure what @accsix is actually tweeting about. “Best practices in theory often result in best intentions in reality,” begins Spano’s Dec. 22 gem, “unique variables must drive unique practices in similar business lines.” Come again? “If the value of information at rest greatly diminishes over time, shouldn’t our security model be more flexible and adaptive?” If only, general! Run with that! Lead the way! I promise it’ll get you more followers.